Sunday, November 30, 2014

Staunton, November 30 – Announcements
that the Russian government will give the Moscow Patriarchate two billion
rubles (40 million US dollars) over the next two years to open “spiritual-enlightenment
centers” at a time when Moscow is cutting funding for the social and medical
needs of Russians will further undermine Russian Orthodoxy in Russia.

On the one hand, it will underscore
what Russians already know, that the Moscow Patriarchate is more an agency of
the state than a religious organization. And on the other, it will call into
question not only the government’s priorities but Patriarch Kirill’s insistence
that his church is committed to social justice.

While ethnic Russians overwhelming
say they are Orthodox, they are in fact “ethnic Christians” in much the same
way that many, albeit a smaller percentage, Muslims are “ethnic Muslims.”That is, they associate with the church at
the level of identity, but they do not take part in religious activities.

What this latest Russian government
decision is likely to do is to undermine that link between ethnic and religious
identity, exactly the opposite of what the Kremlin and its ideologists say they
want, and thus drive down rather than boost religious participation, which at
least in terms of what the hierarchy says is what its members declare they
desire.

The money is being allocated out of
the federal program for “Strengthening the Unity of the Russian Nation,” officials
say, and will be used to construct 23 Church-controlled “spiritual” centers in
Tver, Saratov, Irkutsk, Daghestan, Mordvinia, North Osetia and other regions (polit.ru/article/2014/11/28/centrs/).

Maksim Shevchenko, a member of the Presiential Council on
Inter-Ethnic Relations, told Polit.ru that in his opinion, young people are not
going to flock to these centers as the Patriarchate claims. There are better and
“more effective” ways of reaching out to them than rebuilding Soviet-style “houses
of culture.

“Careerists”
can be counted on to show up to win points from the bosses, but “the masses of
young people will remain just where they were” – beyond the reach of the Russian
Orthodox Church or the state.

Yet
another reason for suspecting that this latest state-church effort will
backfire is that it has brought new attention to just how much money the
Russian Orthodox Church is taking in and thus raising questions about how it is
spent, given that there are so many Russians now in need of assistance.

Figures
from 2013 cited by Polit.ru show that the Church had an income of 4.6 billion
rubles (150 million US dollars at the rate of exchange then current), a vast
sum in Russian terms. The highest earner last year was the Petersburg
eparchate, followed by Moscow and then Vologda Oblast.

Staunton, November 30 – The ethnonym
“Tatar” has a long a complicated history, one that reflects both the
understanding and confusions of investigators and officials and that highlights
both real links and imaginary ones, according to Pavel Gusterin, a specialist
on Central Asia and the Middle East at the Russian Institute for Strategic
Research.

In a note for the Centrasia.ru
portal, Gusterin says that the term first appears in Chinese sources as a
designator for nomadic groups to the southeast of Lake Baikal. The name “Tatar”
derives from the Chinese “ta-ta” which some link to what horseman say to their
horses to get them going (centrasia.ru/news.php?st=1417198980).

Other scholars, although Gusterin
does not mention this, have suggested that this doubling of a syllable is a way
of indicating that the people so designated do not speak the language their
neighbors know as in the case of the Greek “bar-bar” which becomes “barbarian”
and the Turkish “ga-ga” which survives in the ethnonym “Gagauz.”

Gusterin, however, does cite one
nineteenth century French orientalist who explained why the Tatars are
sometimes called “Tartars.” According to Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat, some Chinese
dialects have a sound close to “r” and thus when they said “ta-ta,” it came out
sounding like “tar-tar.”That name is
also found in Arabic and Persian sources.

However that may be, the Chinese
initially used the term “ta-ta” to designate peoples who would later be identified as Mongols and Tunguses but
then began to restrict its application to nomads who attacked China.The Mongols continued to be called Tatars
because the mother of Chingiz Khan was from a Tatar tribe.

In the middle of the 13th century,
Europeans began to use the term Tatar to designate the Mongol conquerors of Eurasia
and the residents of the new kingdoms and khanates formed in the Volga region,
the Caucasus, in Crimea, in Siberia and elsewhere. Over time, Europeans came to
distinguish between the Mongols and the Tatars, retaining the latter term for
the latter groups.

But because the number of Mongol conquerors was so small, they
were rapidly swallowed up by Turkic groups and became in many cases Turkic
speakers. Thus, “the name ‘Tatars’ was retained despite the disintegration of the
Mongol states.”

Gusterin
says there is a parallel between what happened in this case with what happened
among the Slavs. In the former, the chain of identities was “Mongols-Tatars-Volga
Turks;” in the latter, “Varyags, Rus, and Eastern Slavs” – “with only this
difference: the Rus did not conquer the eastern Slavs.”

In the khanates the Golden Horde
established, the Russian researcher says, only the elites were called Tatars.
But as the khanates disintegrated or were conquered, the term was transferred
to the population as a whole, and that process led Russian researchers and
officials to call all their populations “Tatars.”

Thus, from the 15th to the 19th
centuries, Russian sources used the term “Tatar” to designate “the
Azerbaijanis, the peoples of the North Caucasus, the Crimea, the Volga, Central
Asia and Siberia, including the Astrakhan, Kazan, Crimean and Siberian Tatars.” But they stopped using it for the Mongols,
Tibetans, Tunguses, and Manchurian nationalities.

By the early 20th century, Gusterin says, “the
majority of Tatars [as Russians used the term] called themselves Tatars,” as
was shown by the results of the first Soviet census in 1926. The following
year, the Soviets published a list of them, which included the Crimean Tatars,
the Volga tatars, the Kasimov Tatars, and the Tobolsk Tatars.

They were officially recognized by the Soviet state as “separate
peoples.” In addition, there were listed the Belarusian Tatars, whose ancestors
had been brought form Crimea to Poland but who had adopted the Belarusian language
while remaining Muslims. And Moscow promoted the distinctiveness of these
various identities in contrast to other Turkic groups with historical names
like the Balkars, the Bashkirs, the Karachays, the Kumyks and the Nogays.

Staunton, November 30 – Many people
in many countries are angry about this or that aspect of their lives, but they
do not become a political force until they decide that the solution to their
problems requires either a change in the policies of the government or, more
radically, a change in the regime itself.

That may now be happening with
environmentalism in the Russian Federation. Aleksey Yablokov, a biologist who
founded Russia’s Greenpeace organization already in Soviet times, says that the
situation in the environment in the Russian capital is so dire that it can be
saved only by a change in the political regime (snob.ru/profile/22957/blog/84400).

He describes five threats to the
health and welfare of Muscovites, stressing that some of these are well
understood by the population while others are not and that some of the steps
the powers that be have taken in recent years, steps that he calls “the de-ecologization
of the state” are making things worse.

The first threat, Yablokov says, are
chemical emissions. When there was an accident at the Moscow Oil Processing
Plant on November 11-12, two million Muscovites called the city government’s
hotline to complain about the smell.And
it is likely that as many as half of all Muscovites in fact suffered from that
problem.

But despite the alarms raised, this
problem was not as serious as many other chemical emissions into the air and
water. This incident caused only a few tens of thousands to suffer from
breathing problems, and “only several hundred” residents landed in hospitals as
a result. Many other accidents and even regular emissions have caused far more
problems.

The second environmental threat, he
continues, is the release of radioactivity.“Moscow is the only capital in the world on the territory of which there
are nuclear reactors,” with at least 11 research reactors in the city or in the
surrounding oblast.Most have been
stopped, but their radioactive cores have not been removed and remain “extremely
dangerous.”

Government monitoring, as the recent
oil plant accident showed, “is not particularly effective,” Yablokov says. And
while simultaneous accidents in all the radioactive facilities is small, even
one can be a challenge, especially since, as in one recent case, officials kept
fire fighters from entering a reactor building for four hours out of security
concerns.

The third environmental threat comes
from automobiles. “100 percent of the residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg
breathe dirty air,” and for 95 percent of this, “automobiles are guilty.” Their
emissions poison people both when they breathe in the particles emitted and
even when they don’t: some of the poisons enter through the skin.

And those who think that the
situation is better in the winter are wrong, Yablokov says. The cars stir up
chemicals put down on the streets and thus spread these poisons into the air
and thus into the lungs of Muscovites.

The fourth threat is from dirty
water. The water processing facilities in the two Russian capitals work well,
but the water has to pass through pipelines which are aging and which often follow
sewage lines that leak.As a result,
officials acknowledge that “three to four percent” of the water Muscovites use
has more contamination than standards require.

The actual percentage is almost
certainly larger because in some parts of the Russian capital, the water is
contaminated by rare earth minerals that can make people sick immediately or
over time, Yablokov says.

And the fifth threat involves the
destruction of the city’s green spaces, an action that is directly traceable to
the commitment of the Sobyanin administration to build more churches and
restaurants in the name of creating “recreational” opportunities for the
population. But this is “dangerous for city residents,” the ecologist says.

“Americans have calculated that one
large tree in a city preserves the life of one resident,” Yablokov notes, and
in recent years, the city authorities have cut down “tens of thousands of trees”
and thus put at risk the same number of Russians living there.

He also points out that drivers
sitting in long lines “receive a larger dose of harmful substances than do
pedestrians,” noting that Moscow has fewer cars per capita than do Paris or New
York but longer lines.Bike riders also
breathe in this contaminated air. Thus, promoting bike riding as a way of
improving health, as officials now do, may have just the opposite effect.

Staunton, November 30 – Ignored by Russian
officials in Moscow and Pskov, some 2,000 people and businesses of Veliky Luki
in Pskov oblast have organized a Union for the Rebirth of Pskov Kray to provide
assistance to those who need it most in one of the most economically depressed
regions of European Russia.

The group, which journalist
Aleksandr Kalinin says, has given itself “a somewhat pretentious name,” has
been active for a decade and includes many who are not themselves well off but
who have not fallen into the poverty and despair of many of their neighbors (politobzor.net/show-37653-spasaem-sebya-sami.html).

And the Union has helped dozens if
not hundreds of single mothers, veterans of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster
clean up, invalids, and veterans of World War II, the Afghan war and the
Chechen war, people who have slipped through the increasingly thin
state-supplied safety net.

Its individual actions may seem
small and unimportant in the grand design, Kalinin says, but to those who
receive its help, they matter profoundly and ultimately they may matter more
than the actions of the distant political parties and equally distant state
institutions.

In one case, the Union gave a woman
who had lost her cow the money to buy another one so she could have milk for
her children. In another, it provided funds so that the daughter of an invalid
mother could continue her education and become a nurse. And in a third, it
found and renovated an apartment for a Chechen war veteran who had returned
home without legs.

All of these people had sought
assistance from state agencies, assistance that they are entitled to under the
law. And all had been refused. But rather than allow them to suffer, the Union
raised money by various activities, helped with renovations, and secured access
to those who would never have had a chance otherwise.

But its members have done
more: They have collected books for rural libraries which could not afford to
buy them. They have bought furniture and other goods for poor people. They have
organized concerts to raise money for poor children. And they have sent the
most seriously ill to Moscow and Petersburg for treatment.

The Union’s good works continue to expand, Kalinin says,
noting that it and its members are filling a need that the Russian authorities
won’t or can’t. And he concludes that while such social assistance is
important, it is “secondary” to the political implications of such
self-organization.

The Union is empowering people offering the help and
helping those who can’t get it from anyone else. “May God grant,” the
journalist concludes, “that every one of our political parties would be
conducting something similar in local areas.” Russia and not just Pskov would
be much better off.

Staunton, November 30 – Seventy-five
years ago today, Moscow launched what became known as the Winter War against
Finland. It used much the same propaganda and tactics it is using against
Ukraine now. It faced far greater resistance than its vast disproportion of
forces had led it to believe. And thanks to that resistance, it achieved far
less than Moscow had expected.

Not surprisingly, many commentators
in Ukraine and even in Russia and Finland are drawing parallels between the two
Russian wars, parallels which carry with them lessons for all sides about the
failures of international diplomacy, the continuities of Russian policies, and
the relative importance of arms.

In August 1939, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact, Hitler and Stalin came up with a grand bargain dividing Europe into
spheres of influence, Shama recalls. On the basis of that, Moscow forced the
three Baltic countries to capitulate to its demands and then illegally annexed
them to the Soviet Union.

But the Finns refused to go along.
They “wanted to retain their neutrality” in the looming war, and they
recognized that the presence of Soviet forces on their territory would not only
be an insult to their independence but would inevitably draw them into that
conflict on one side or the other.

But the Soviet government had no
intention of backing away from what it thought were its rights under the
Molotov-Ribbentrop accord, Shama says, all the more so because Moscow believed that
Finland should be part of the USSR since it had been part of the Russian Empire
between 1809 and 1917.

The Kremlin tried diplomacy,
demanding in talks with Helsinki that lasted more than a year that Finland rent
Khanko Island and agree to a shift in the border 60 kilometers away from
Leningrad. Such a concession, Soviet diplomats and generals said, was required to ensure the defense of the northern capital. But the
Finns refused and in October 1939 broke off talks.

On November 3, Moscow mobilized the Leningrad military
district, and on November 26, Russian special forces organized a provocation involving
what Soviet propagandists asserted was an attack on USSR forces by Finnish
ones.Helsinki denied involvement and
said it would conduct a full-scale investigation.

But
Moscow wasn’t interested in talks, and on November 30, 1939, Stalin ordered his
forces to begin to attack Finland. On that date, Soviet planes dropped 600
bombs on Helsinki, killing 91 Finns.

“Despite
Kremlin propaganda,” Shama continues, “the Finns were not prepared for war.
Their army consisted of 30,000 soldiers and officers,” and they had been
reducing their defense spending for two decades confident that the League of
Nations would prevent any attack and guarantee their security.

But
the unprovoked Soviet attack so angered the Finns that thousands of them
immediately took up arms and went to the front, often without uniforms because
none were available.They were vastly
outnumbered in personnel and arms, but they were inspired by Marshal Mannerheim
who said “we are fighting for our home, faith and fatherland.”

Soviet
forces were inspired by a quite different idea: they had been told that they
were “freeing the Finnish people from the oppression of the capitalists,” but
after a few days Soviet soldiers on Finnish land were asking themselves “Why
are we liberating the Finns? They live so well.”

Moreover,
the Soviet forces found they had no one to liberate because the Finns withdrew
from the border regions, burning their homes and farms so that the Soviets
would not get anything they might use against Finland.

Then,
one day into the fighting, the Soviet media announced that in a “liberated”
village near the border, a new Finnish government had been formed, headed by
Otto Kuusinen, the communist whose revolt Mannerheim had himself put down in
1918. A day later, he signed a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet
government to “legalize” the Kremlin’s aggression.

In
preparation for this campaign, the Soviet military had created, beginning in
October 1939, a “Finnish Peoples Army,” filling it with Finns and Karelians who
lived on Soviet territory and then even with Belarusians. That step led to a
Soviet joke at the time, Shama says: “Minsk Finns will march onto Finnish
mines.”

Finland
had erected some defenses earlier, and the Soviet command was well aware of
those and quite prepared to go around or over them. But, as the Ukrainian
commentator points out, Moscow had not taken into account the Finnish will to
fight and expected an easy and quick victory, one that was supposed to be
complete by Stalin’s birthday on December 21.

The
Soviet advance slowed as Finnish resistance grew, but the Finns, having
suffered 25,000 combat dead in the course of 105 days of fighting, finally had
to sue for peace, even though they had inflicted 126,000 dead on the invaders.
And they had to yield a tenth of their territory to Moscow.

But
that was less than Moscow expected to gain, and so it could hardly justify the claims
of victory it put out and that were accepted by some in the West.Moreover, the way in which Finland and the
Soviet Union treated their combat losses spoke volumes about the differences
between the two countries, differences which are in evidence in Ukraine and
Russia now.

When
the war began, Mannerheim ordered that “each soldier killed was to be buried
with military honors” in specially designated cemeteries. In the Soviet Union,
Andrey Zhdanov, head of the Leningrad CPSU obkom, “categorically forbid telling
relatives of dead soldiers about the destruction of their near ones” and to
take other steps to hide such losses as well.

On
this anniversary of the Winter War, Ukrainians are thinking about that conflict
perhaps more than any other people except for the Finns.Roman Bochkala, a Ukrainian military analyst,
spoke for many in his country when he wrote of that long-ago conflict in terms every
Ukrainian would recognize as like the one now (charter97.org/ru/news/2014/11/29/128592/).

Like
Ukraine, the Finns faced an overwhelming adversary, “a horde [which] wanted to
suppress its opponents by its size. David went into the ring against Goliath.
And he won.”Of course, Bochkala writes,
the Finns were frightened but they were not intimidated, and “they fought like
lions.”

They
understood something that Ukrainians should as well: “in war, the main thing is
not quantity but motivation and intelligence.”

Vadim
Shtepa, who lives in Karelia and who supports Ukrainian efforts to defend their
nation against Vladimir Putin’s aggression, reflects on this anniversary? “What
can one say? The only thing is to wish our Ukrainian friends [in this new
Winter War] to be no weaker than the Finns!” (rufabula.com/author/shtepa/203).

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Staunton, November 29 – The
continuing decline in oil prices, a political move by the West against Moscow,
should cause Russians to recall Stalin’s warning in 1931 that “we are 50 to 100
years behind the advanced countries and must catch up within ten years. Either
we will do that or they will crush us,” according to an Orenburg blogger.

Too many people, including
prominently Development Minister Aleksey Ulyukayev, think that Russia can
escape its current dilemma by liberalization, but such an approach will fail,
not only leaving Russia more dependent on the international economic system it
cannot control but also depriving Russians of the sense of responsibility for
their own fate.

Ulyukayev, Super says, reflects this
approach and fears any talk of mobilization “like fire” because it would
involve forcing people to “fulfill common tasks,” rather than allow them to
continue to avoid “personal responsibility” by pointing to the “’hand of the market’”
or the decline in the price of oil.

Russians instead should remember the
“historic” words Stalin uttered on February 4, 1931, and launch a similar
mobilization program to rebuild and expand Russia’s industrial base.

Such
an effort, Super suggests, would allow the country to withstand any foreign
challenges just as Stalin’s allowed the USSR to hold out “against the united
force of Europe in the Great Fatherland War.”

Indeed, he writes, “what is needed
is an immediate mobilization without which there will not be industrialization.
A labor, moral and political mobilization. But in the first instance a
mobilization of the elite itself because otherwise the people will not have
faith and any plans and appeals of the bosses will go down the drain. Together
with the country.”

The current elite as typified by
Ulyukayev isn’t capable and therefore “it must go” and go one hopes “peacefully
and voluntarily.” But to save Russia, go it must.

Staunton, November 29 – Some in
Daghestan now think that it is time for each Daghestani nation to have a
separate republic rather than continue to live in a single “all-Daghestan ‘collective
farm,’” an attitude that may be indicative of what other larger nations are
thinking about their status relative to the Russian Federation.

In a Daghestani Internet forum,
Murad Abdullayev says that the current multi-national republic has had its day
and that “possibly the time has come” for each of its various peoples to form
their own republics within the Russian Federation, given their increasing size
and increasing conflicts (forum-dag.ru/content/mozhet-dagestan-luchshe-razdelit).

Since the Daghestan ASSR was formed,
“the share of the population of [that republic] in Russia has increased by a
factor of eight,” and “the current Republic of Daghestan has become a headache
for Moscow.” It doesn’t pay its taxes and now owes Moscow more than anyone else
except Ukraine, and on its territory, there is a war going on which the
leadership change did nothing to stop.

The problem of taxes would be solved
if each people had its own republic. “The majority of Avars are too proud to
steal and lie; the Darghins are able to divide up their profits, and the
Lezgins are law-abiding … Now, [none of them] pays taxes because each thinks
that someone else must solve the problem.”

“The Lezgins consider,” Abdullayev
writes, “that the Avars must solve the problem because they are ‘in power’ in
Daghestan; the Avars think that the Dargins must pay because they live better,
but the Dargins respond that the Lezgins are the wealthiest Daghestanis in
Russia.”

None of them is prepared to take responsibility for “’the
collective farm’” because none of them feels a part of it.Given that, the writer says, they view
Daghestan not as a mother but as an evil stepmother, someone from whom it is
almost an act of nobility to take something from to help their own.

Staunton, November 29 – The fate not
only of Ukraine but also of the entire post-Soviet space and even the survival
of Russia itself as a single unified country is being decided by what is
happening in the conflict in southeastern Ukraine, according to Aydos Sarym, a
political scientist from Kazakhstan.

He told the UNIAN news agency that
what is going on in Ukraine is forcing everyone in the post-Soviet space to
make “a moral and political choice” and nowhere is that trend stronger than in
Kazakhstan in which reactions to Ukraine have become “a litmus test” of all the
divisions, “generational, ethnic and so on,” which exist there.

Many
ethnic Ukrainians who earlier had not paid particular attention to their
ethnicity are now doing so, he said, and “many Kazakhs are very actively
supporting their Ukrainian brothers,” with the country’s social networks
increasingly decorated in Ukrainian yellow and blue.

Kazakhs
understand that they have “much to learn from Ukrainians, including how not to
repeat the tragic and even fatal errors which were made by the Ukrainian
authorities over the course of the last year,” especially as Kazakhstan shares
7500 kilometers of borders with Russia, three and half times as many as Ukraine
does.

All
post-Soviet countries are in the position of “post-colonial and post-Soviet
transit,” Sarym said. And given the situation in Russia, the non-Russian
countries have only two paths for breaking with the imperial past: armed force
as in Georgia and Ukraine or “a peaceful path of imitating integration
processes.”

Kazakhstan
has chosen the latter, and Ukrainians must understand that what it is doing is
using the imitation of integration in order to pursue greater independence.
Once they do, they will recognize that the Eurasian Economic Community Vladimir
Putin is pushing will have no more success than the CIS.

Kazakhs
are very worried that Russia will try to annex part of their country given
statements from Moscow dismissing the existence of their historical statehood and
the existence of “revanchist and revisionist attitudes” in the Russian media,
attitudes that were marginal a year or two ago but now are at the center of
Russian politics.

Over
the last several years, Kazakhstan has had to put down “several attempts at
armed uprisings organized by Russian national Bolsheviks,” he continued. And
recently, “Russia in violation of the principles of trust and security adopted
within the Shanghai Cooperation Accord without warning conducted exercises
dangerously close to the borders of Kazakhstan.”

There are
clearly people in Russia who believe that they could carry out “a short
victorious war” in Kazakhstan and thus shore up their power in Russia itself.
The Kazakhstan military is not in good shape: it is about where the Ukrainian
army was a year or 18 months ago. But that is not where the real problem lies.

“Our problem,” Sarym said, “is that
the leadership of the country lived for a long time as a prisoner of the
illusion that the entire world is hostile to it and that only Russian can
guarantee security both for our country and (above all) the ruling regime.”Today, as a result of Russia’s “paranoid
foreign policy” and actions in Ukraine, “those illusions are being dispelled.”

Kazakh analysts suggest there are
three parts of Kazakhstan where Moscow might try a Crimean-style annexation:
the oblasts of Kostanay, North Kazakhstan and Eastern Kazakhstan, which border
Russia and have significant Russian-speaking populations.

But “in the conditions of
Kazakhstan, any attempt by Russia to annex the territory of the northern oblasts
would lead not to ‘a hybrid war’ restricted to a definite territory but more
than that to ethnic cleansings and massive violence through the entire
territory of the country.” Thus, for Russia to try it would be “the most
complete insanity.”

Tragically, there are some in Moscow
who are nonetheless thinking of making such a move.Kazakhs have lone joked that “what Zhirinovsky
says, Putin is thinking,” a reference to the anti-Kazakh and imperial bombast
of the former than often has been a leading indicator of what the Kremlin ruler
plans.

At present, Sarym said, there is no
Russophobia in Kazakhstan, “but the situation in Russia today is such that
there they are ready to consider Russophobic anything which does not please
them or which does not fit with the understanding of [Moscow’s] ruling elite.”

Ukrainians should take courage from
the fact that, despite intense pressure from Moscow, “Kazakhstan does not
support the occupation of Crimea and does not recognize the Russian separatists
in Eastern Ukraine.” Indeed, both of Russia’s “partners” in the new union “have
frequently demonstrated” their independence from Moscow on matters Ukrainian.

Staunton, November 29 – Stavropol
Mufti Muhammad-haji Rakhimov told the Third Stavropol Forum of the World
Russian Popular Assembly that “Russian [rossiiskye] Muslims are an inalienable
part of the Russian [russky] world,” a statement at odds with some by other
speakers who stressed the Orthodox and ethnic nature of that idea.

The mufti added that “contemporary
Russian Muslims are sincere patriots who love their motherland and serve it.
For the world community, there are no ‘rossiyane’ [the non-ethnic civic
identity Moscow earlier had sought to promote]; everyone calls all of us ‘russkiye’
[a term historically used for ethnic Russians].”

Those pushing the idea of a Russian
world would like to ensure that they have the loyalty of those who are Russian
citizens even if they are not Orthodox or ethnic Russians, but they face a
serious problem: if they include them, they reduce the Russian world to loyalty
to the Russian state alone, perhaps the Kremlin’s goal but certainly not that
of many Russian nationalists.

Most speakers at this meeting as at
others have sought to avoid the kind of hard and fast definition of the Russian
world that would exclude many people, but their efforts to do so have the
effect of highlighting the weakness of what is after all the chief ideological
component of Vladimir Putin’s rule.

One participant at the Stavropol
meeting, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, in his remarks showed just how difficult
it is even for those most loyal to the Kremlin to square this circle in ways
that do not drain the concept of most of its meaning and thus limit its utility
as a mobilizing tool.

Chaplin, a close protégé of Moscow
Patriarch Kirill and one of the leading ideologists of the Russian Orthodox
Church, reminded the group of Kirill’s statement that Russians have always been
guided by five values: faith, justice, solidarity, dignity, and a commitment to
state power.

“We have defeated many attacks from
the East and from the West, and we will defeat as well those who try to impose
on us life according to their alien rules,” Chaplin said. “We will defeat
America, not necessarily on the field of battle but on the field of ideas and
meaning.” And the reason for that is that “behind us is truth.”

For Russians, he continued, “there
are things which are more important than profit, comfort and even earthly life.”
And “we have everything needed so that without retreating into isolationism, we
can offer to the world a moral order based on our values.” That “order” will be
backed by “thinking people” in the West, the Islamic world, China and Latin
America.”

Chaplin did not say how those who
accept Islam or follow Confucianism or believe in democracy and freedom could
support a world order defined by Orthodox Christianity, but it may be that he
excludes all those from the category of “thinking people” who he says are
coming out in support of Moscow.

Staunton, November 29 – In words
that are clearly intended to intimidate but that may have just the opposite
effect by exposing official nervousness, Russian Interior Minister Vladimir
Kolokoltsev says that Moscow is ready to use its internal troops against any
Maidan-like activity in any part of the Russian Federation.

The minister told the military
council of the commanders of internal forces that their units are “one of the most
powerful instruments for opposing the threat of risings like those which have
taken place in Ukraine and in other CIS countries” and that he is “certain”
that they can succeed in preventing them (top.rbc.ru/politics/28/11/2014/54783443cbb20f1658f7538b).

According to Kolokoltsev, MVD forces
under his command are ready to be moved to any region of the country in which
such threats appear, something he said could become necessary because those who
threaten Russia from abroad are doing what they can to affect its domestic national
security as well.

At
the meeting, he said that the forces had demonstrated their capacities over the
course of the last year by inflicting “significant harm” to the militants in
the North Caucasus, providing security for the Olympics in Sochi, and
protecting important government facilities against terrorist attack.

And he noted that MVD units had
detained more than 850,000 Russians for various legal violations, “including
almost 7,000 for crimes.”The larger
figure includes those who were arrested and then released for taking part in
demonstrations that did not have the approval of the authorities.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Staunton, November 28 – Seventy-one
percent of Russians in a poll conducted by VTsIOM earlier this week said they
had not heard enough about the main ideological theme of the Putin regime, the
Russian world, to be able to describe it; and only one Russian in eight was
ready to try to provide a definition of that world to pollsters.

In announcing these findings, VTsIOM
general director Valery Fedorov said that in his view, “this means that we are
at the beginning of this project and not at its end,” although he noted that
the same survey had found that 63 percent of Russians believe that the “Russian
world” is more likely to exist than not.

The sociologist stressed that the
term has a long history: it wasn’t created yesterday or even a decade ago. But
for a long time, it was employed only “in a narrow circle of intellectuals, ‘despairing
bureaucrats,’ and did not pass” in the population at large. But in the last
year, “everything has changed” and people should understand it better.

Staunton, November 28 – Most analyses
of recent developments in Ukraine start with the Maidan, but it may be more
useful for understanding why those have occurred if one considers the actions
that led to the Maidan and the extent to which these were both unplanned and
counter-productive, according to Mikhail Fishman.

The Moscow journalist says that the
Maidan was “to a great degree provoked from outside,” but “not in the sense in
which Vladimir Putin loves to talk about” such color revolutions. Instead,
Putin himself was the outside force, and the impact of his actions led
Yanukovich to take the decisions which triggered the Maidan.

The Ukrainian president was already
a failure before all this happened, Fishman says, but had he not, under
pressure from Putin, turned “180 degrees” on the issue of signing an agreement
with the EU at the Vilnius summit, “hundreds of thousands of people would not
have come out into the street (slon.ru/russia/kak_kreml_priblizil_nachalo_maydana-1189211.xhtml).

“No one knows” exactly what Putin
said to Yanukovich at their critical November 9 meeting, Fishman concedes, “but
there is the suspicion” that the Ukrainian leader knew what was coming given
the harsh words he had been hearing from the Kremlin in the summer and fall of
2013.

Ukrainian and Polish officials have
said that even before November, Putin had sought to intimidate Yanukovich with the
threat of a Russian annexation of Crimea.And it is certainly likely that such threats were not delivered on an “extemporaneous”
basis but rather part of a general policy.

What is striking, Fishman says, is
that just before the summer of 2013, “Russian officials were not excluded
Ukraine’s membership in two trade zones at one and the same time,” and that
could have been arranged with some careful sleight of hand, especially as the
EU was not moving quickly given its insistence on the release of Yuliya
Timoshenko.

Given this, “it is very difficult to
describe what happened between Moscow and Kyiv from May 2013 onward within the
framework of some strict logic,” Fishman says. Instead, one needs to consider
an alternative approach, one that focuses on Putin’s personality rather than
Russian national interests.

Moscow’s approach was full of contradictions
up to that time because Russia’s interests in Ukraine were contradictory, but
when Vladimir Putin went to Kyiv, he did so “not as a guest of Yanukovich” as
one might have expected but “as “the builder of the Russian world,” something
that preceded his change in Moscow’s course.

Pressure on
Yanukovich intensified to the point that “by the end of August, anti-Russian
attitudes in Kyiv were more like hysteria” than anything else. And then at the
end of September, Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s close aide, took charge. It was
clear to all that “Putin was on the attack” and would continue to do so.

What was not
clear then was his goal.

If Putin wanted
to preserve the status quo, his actions included “a change of serious
managerial errors” of the kind one has seen Russian leaders make before as in
the case with Nicholas I in the lead up to the first Crimean War.“But possibly,” Fishman argues, what we have
seen is “a somewhat different case.”

That is
suggested by the fact that the program Putin advanced when he ran for a third
term had no real content and that “the main problem consisted in its complete
lack of an agenda: to rule is fine but quite boring” if all he was going to do
was to continue what he had already put in place.

But that left
Putin with no challenge and consequently, Fishman says, the Kremlin leader “decided
to take a risk” to prevent his country’s slide back into stagnation and to
occupy himself with a kind of adventure.That possibility, one that reflects Putin’s personality, goes a long way
to explain what Putin did regarding Ukraine beginning last summer.

German
Chancellor Angela Merkel spent four hours with Putin in Brisbane attempting to
find the answer to the question as why Putin had done what he had done. She
didn’t get an answer, but the reason for that may not be the one many have
suggested: that Putin keeps his cards close to his chest.

The real
reason, Fishman says, is that Putin doesn’t have an answer, that “he does not
know why he provoked the conflict in Ukraine’s southeast.”That would fit the facts that suggest Putin
had earlier decided to create a crisis somewhere without reflecting in any
detail on just what the consequences of any one of them might be.

From the
Kremlin leader’s perspective, this is a kind of adventure, one that by
definition he has decided he does not know in advance just how things will turn
out, a dangerous one to be sure but more interesting perhaps to him than being
a president who simply adopts a policy of continuation with no opportunities
for creativity.